Monitoring

There’s a significant amount we can learn about your website by monitoring it using the Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA). By understanding how your website is being used and what you’re looking to achieve, we can look to make improvements.

Broadly speaking the GSC provides data on how the website is performing, whilst GA shows you who’s using the site and how they’re interacting with it.

This page outlines why it’s important to monitor your website and the services we provide in this area. We have a fixed price for a Full Review, but please contact us to discuss your requirements so we can provide a personalised quote for you.

If your website is not registered with the GSC or GA we’d ask you to do this and then wait 90 days before we start to monitor your site for you. In that time valuable data will have been collected for us to analyse. We ask our clients to register their website with the GSC and GA in their name and add us as users to their accounts.

What services do we provide?

We conduct a Full Review on GSC and GA when we take on a new client. After that our clients have two options. We suggest their decision on how to proceed should be based on how frequently they’re planning to adapt or add content on their website. If they’re not planning to update it then an annual review thereafter should suffice. If they are planning regular content releases then we’d advise they go for a Monthly Essentials package. We provide full, in-depth reporting for both options.

This page will outline the areas covered in the Full Review. We’ll also highlight the areas you may consider adding to your Monthly Essentials package.

Why are these services important?

By having a better understanding of how your website is performing and being used, you can look to improve aspects to achieve your goals. In addition, it’s crucial to monitor the health of your website so as to fix any issues that should arise.

How much do these services cost?

We charge £250 to conduct the first Full Review and £125 for each one thereafter. The report delivered after your Full Review will detail any recommended tasks, with a quote for each.

The cost of the Monthly Essentials package is dependent on the tasks you want to include and the frequency with which they need to be completed. As such a fixed rate cannot be published here. To give you an idea, a typical package for a client regularly releasing content (up to four posts or pages a month), is outlined below, and would cost £60 per month:

Monitoring how new content has been optimised on-page

Reporting on how your content has been found on the SERPs

Monitoring for Google penalities

Monitoring for crawl errors

Submitting sitemaps after new content is published

Filtering out any new spambots from GA

Providing a custom GA report highlighting any trends or issues.

As with the Full Review, any work we deem as important that may arise from these tasks would be quoted separately. You’ll find extra clarification on these tasks and the other tasks included in the Full Review in the next part of this article.

You can specify the title, url and meta description for each piece of content on your site. In addition the pages on your site might include structured data markup which helps Google understand the content on each page. Adding this markup can also improve the chances of your content ranking. We will also check for any sitelinks. These are the additional links added by Google to the SERPS below your meta description, as per the image below.

The Full Review provides us with the opportunity to check the title, url and meta for each page of content, any structured data and your sitelinks, and highlight any issues in our report. We would provide recommendations and suggest a procedure with an estimate for how to correct any issues found.

In the Monthly Essentials package we will review the titles, urls and metas for any content added that month and add any structured data mark up that if required.

How often your content is returned on the SERPS

We can learn a lot from the GSC and GA about how your content is ranking on the SERPs. For example we can report back on the most popular search terms people are using which generates click through to your content. We can also advise you which pages on your site are getting the most clicks for any given period of time and much more. We can use this information to see how your content is performing against the keywords you’re targeting and make suggestions for how to improve the number of times your content is returned on the SERPS, the position of said content on the SERPs or your click through rate as necessary. This reporting forms the basis for much of the search engine optimisation work we undertake.

In addition we can get some idea of what websites are linking to yours and how well your content is linked internally, which helps to assess whether the most important pages on your site are getting the traffic they require. In addition we’ll be able to see if your website is mobile-friendly and whether your site has been penalised in the past by Google.

The Full Review will include a report of how your content is performing on search and provide recommendations for further discussion. We’ll also report on your internal and external links, whether your site is mobile-friendly or if penalties have been applied.

The Monthly Essentials package provides a report on how your content has performed in the last month.

How accurately is your content being indexed on the SERPS

It’s important to check regularly how Google are indexing the content on your site. If you create, adapt or remove content you need to tell Google about it. We can advise Google about any changes you’ve made to the content on your site, review how they have indexed it and fix any issues.

In addition we can get a good indication of how your website is performing, which in itself has an impact on how your content is ranked. If your site is inefficient we can make recommendations for how to improve this.

The Full Review will report on how your content is being indexed and provide recommendations for how to improve the situation if required.

The Monthly Essentials package includes monitoring for crawl errors and subsequent fixes. If you are regularly creating new content we will resubmit your sitemap and check the new content is being indexed correctly, on an ad hoc basis.

Who is visiting your site

We use GA to assess the traffic that is visiting our clients websites, to alert them to anything of significance and make recommendations against their goals where necessary.

Before we start the Full Review we’ll filter out any spam referral traffic that could be skewing the data. We’ll also discuss and set goals we can monitor via GA. Once we are happy that the data is genuine and the goals are in place, we’ll allow for 90 days of traffic to be monitored (the spammy referrals unfortunately are not removed from historic traffic) and provide a report which will scrutinise the four key areas; audience (who are they, what are they using), acquisition (where did they come from – be it paid, SEO or social), behaviour (what do they do when they get there) and conversions (did they convert to the set goals).

If required we’ll also report back on the performance of your site, how people are using the search bar on your website (if you have one) and provide a breakdown of how people are using specific areas of the site (event tracking).

The Monthly Essentials package includes a custom report delivered by email that highlights the latest data for the key areas, and identifies any trends and make recommendations.